


Memoirs of a Rebel

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-17
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-21 05:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 22,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4816787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The first time I met Kerr Avon I murdered three men who trusted me in cold blood to save his life.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The first time I met Kerr Avon I murdered three men who trusted me in cold blood to save his life.

He never thanked me of course. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to do so. To him everyone except the insane or the weak acted for their own advantage and he thought my advantage lay with him. He could see the logic of self interest in my actions, so what was there to be grateful about?

At the time, though, I had choices. I was in control. I could have forced him to release Zen then had him executed, kept Liberator, found some other way to get the Federation troops off her and a crew more to my liking on. She’d have been mine, then, the greatest prize in the Galaxy, and things would have turned out very different. I could still be on her now, a middle aged mercenary king with a distinguished greying beard and unthinkable quantities of wealth and power, beneficiary of a decades’ long truce with the Federation and used to a prince’s welcome everywhere else. Or I could have been discovered and killed by Clegg and his men and my frozen corpse could have been drifting through space for the last twenty years dressed in a stolen Federation officer’s uniform, still young, still handsome (possibly handsome- at Clegg’s hands it might have been a rather nasty death), still unwise. Maybe that wouldn’t have been the worst outcome after all. But I chose to save Kerr Avon and Dayna Mellanby instead.

I wouldn’t have had Dayna executed anyway, I hasten to add. I’ve always had a soft spot for beautiful women and she wasn’t one of the Liberator rebels, not back then, just another of us looking for refuge or the main chance or both. No-one on board would have been surprised if I’d shot Avon and kept her alive for the company, least of all Dayna, though she would have been extremely annoyed. We were never what you’d call compatible, Dayna and I, and she could kill a man with her bare hands, so mutual respect was all we ever had. Semi-mutual, anyway. I was sure at the time that she admired me, though looking back I can recall a certain amount of evidence suggesting otherwise. I admired her, anyway. Carefully, from a distance.

I wasn’t exactly admirable, back then. I’m a bit better now, I’m pleased to say. A difficult life lay ahead of me as I strutted around Liberator that day but the life already past had been charmed and I gave myself a lot more credit than I deserved for being alive and in that situation. I must have had subconscious doubts even then about the limits of my abilities, even if I was never aware of them, because I chose Avon as an ally. Unless I just didn’t want him to die. I don’t claim to ever have been entirely logical where Kerr Avon was involved. I’m not sure that anyone else I ever met was either.

Of course he betrayed me almost straight away, which, to be honest, I hadn’t expected, but it was one of those ebb and flow of the battle moments, and I don’t recall ever holding it against him. Maybe I learned something from it, but I doubt it. I wasn’t always that quick at learning those sorts of lessons back then.

What was I like before I met him? It’s not embarrassment that makes me pause, it’s just not that easy to remember that Del Tarrant now, looking back through the years of real life to the time before it started. I’d grown up with every possible advantage; wealth, privilege, influential friends and family, good looks, an abundance of wits and a great deal of natural talent at quite a lot of things. As a child and a young man I’d never once known what it was like to really fail. I’d had lovers but no heartache, though I’d cried melodramatically into a pillow or two when I didn’t get my way. And I liked people; maybe that was the greatest of the many differences between Avon and me. I didn’t want to put myself out too much for others admittedly but I liked company and I liked most of the people I met.

Easily led, is I suppose the right term, though I would never have recognised that in myself then. I’d do something because a friend did it, do it far better than them and convince them, myself and everyone else that it had been my idea all along. That was how I and the rest of the world came to believe that I was a natural leader.

That gap between belief and truth must have confused the Federation’s psych tests somehow because the declared me ideal senior military officer material; brave, resourceful, loyal and ambitious. I was brave enough, I suppose, as someone who’d never faced real danger by then might be, and I flatter myself that I have on many occasions turned out to be rather resourceful, my first meeting with Avon being a perfect example. The Federation thought it had my loyalty in exchange for all the good things in life it would let me have and in other circumstances maybe that would have been enough. It was the ambition where the psych tests really screwed up. I’d been brought up in a fiercely ambitious elite Federation family and back then I spoke the haughty language of assertion and aspiration as a native might but for some reason it never really took, not deep down.

I sailed through the Academy without the Federation ever spotting their mistake. As Avon was soon to find out, what I lack in ambition I make up for with a strong competitive streak, then and still. When I fought to be top of my class I had no thought for the momentous effect it would have on the prestigious career supposedly ahead of me. The Academy had rankings so I simply wanted to be first. I felt I was one of a kind. The Academy instructors no doubt thought that I was just one more cocky rich hotshot like last year’s versions and the year before’s, perfect material for the Federation military complex once they’d rubbed the edges off a bit. The truth, as truth tends to, lay somewhere inbetween.

There’s little else worth telling about those years. I could relate a hundred stories like the ones of how I nearly killed myself and several of my classmates after illicitly souping up the fuel in my racer for the year-end piloting competition, or how I won a thousand credit bet by sleeping with my entire unit in a week then lost it on double or quits because the hot flight instructor that we much admired had no interest whatsoever in male cadets but it’s all of one piece. That was the young man that I was; full of life, empty of any serious thought, in all respects except one exactly who and where the Federation wanted me to be. Almost the real thing. Almost.

That’s why a few years later I could play Federation officer well enough to fool not only Clegg and his men but Avon as well. Later I would find out how hard that last was to achieve. Even now that deception is something I take pride in. It was a good beginning.


	2. Chapter 2

So I joined Liberator, or relinquished my command of her, whichever way you like to think of it. I found out fairly quickly how Avon considered the matter; she had in his mind been his ship long before Blake got himself lost.

Nobody explicitly invited me to sign on with Liberator’s very small gang unless you count Avon’s surly tempered “I suppose we’d better get this over with” before he got Zen to register our voice patterns. Nobody told me what Liberator was intended to do, how the group would work, who was or wasn’t in charge, what responsibilities we each had. It was clear to me that nobody really knew any more. Liberator had lost its heart when Blake went. I don’t recall sympathising. I wasn’t a very sympathetic person. Besides, their loss was an opportunity for me.

Liberator’s people were leaderless and to my eyes I was clearly their only hope. I had Kerr Avon clocked as Blake’s tech support, smart enough, undoubtedly, but not leadership material, not a pirate king. Once they’d all seen what I could do I was sure they’d be glad enough to let a professional take charge. They were used to having a commander, after all. This confused anarchy must be new to them. After all Blake had led them from the start.

That’s why it all went wrong of course. Neither Avon nor I were remotely capable of doing what Blake had done. I suspect Avon must have known that before he tried, but he was grimly determined to keep Liberator at any cost and he couldn’t do it alone. I found that Avon tended towards grim determination about everything that he didn’t dismiss out of hand. I got the impression from the other two that he’d been a little less uncompromising when Blake was around but I’m not sure I believe it. He certainly wasn’t at all light hearted when they met again. 

I on the other hand had no doubt that I could do it. I was trained and experienced as a command officer, after all. Taking charge of a disorganised handful of semi-civilian rebels was the sort of task I was born and bred for.

Maybe if I’d ever actually been much good as a commander I might not have been quite so blasé about the task ahead. As a junior officer I was certainly impressive enough at making plans, outwitting the enemy, charging into battle shouting “Follow me, men!”, but I have very little idea what I’d have done if they hadn’t followed. Fortunately the Federation troops I’d been given were trained well enough and the penalties for defiance severe enough that I could safely take obedience for granted.

We were encouraged to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the men under our command with a handful of suitable words but it was a superficial and fairly meaningless grading process. I tended to rate most of my men as brave and well disciplined because that’s what I liked to think Federation soldiers were like. What my men called me (when out of the hearing of anyone who might report them, naturally) I hate to think but at the time I never considered it. Other than those assessments I don’t recall ever giving the men I led much thought at all. 

I was hardly alone in that of course. What little psychology we had been taught at the Academy had mostly to do with enemy tactics, not the soldiers under our command and cadets never took it very seriously anyway, not like the proper classes about fighting and flying and all the other things we wanted to show off to each other. Nobody would be feted among their peers for topping a psych class so why pay more attention than one had to? The Federation military at the time with the exception of a few naturally perceptive individuals was sadly lacking in any understanding of how people thought. It was reliant on the scarce resource of the separate discipline of psych experts to predict the reactions of its own or the enemy people and generally it just didn’t bother. To give it some credit, it was remarkably good at killing, however. 

Unsurprisingly at the time I had very little idea of the military’s limitations. Despite several years spent getting my own men, the enemy and a regrettable but numerically acceptable number of civilians slaughtered in impressively original fashions and to the general commendation of my superiors I still had no idea that my vaunted elite command training and experience had prepared me to command nothing but the brainwashed and frequently brutalised Federation soldier.

Liberator’s crew, on the other hand, were not troops at all, nor were they civilians, nor mercenaries, nor pirates. They weren’t even rebels, not the kind of rebels I was used to anyway who actually fought for their freedom. They were fugitives from the Federation and in possession of a remarkably impressive ship; otherwise it wasn’t at all clear what they were, apart from unbelievably argumentative.

The first few weeks went about as well, or badly, as one might have expected. We got to know each other pretty quickly; with only five people on the ship you couldn’t exactly stay aloof, though Avon managed it much of the time anyway. In approved Federation style I assessed the material I had to work with. Unsurprisingly in the circumstances I got everything important completely wrong.

Cally; technically competent but unexceptional, and apparently weak. Dayna; skilled and eager but inexperienced, and not used to following commands. They were pleasant enough as shipmates and they could help operate Liberator but they were of limited use otherwise. Possibly with a bit of training Dayna at least could become an effective subordinate. Of course I had to establish my position first, so for now I treated them as equals, moreorless. 

As for Vila, in my experience most locks responded pretty well to a hand blaster. A specialist thief was an unnecessary extravagance. Vila was a command nightmare; he complained, he disobeyed, he fostered general insubordination, he drank and took narcotics and he was a complete coward. If he’d been in the Fed military he’d have been courtmartialed and shot years ago. I might have to tolerate him for now but I wanted Vila off my ship as soon as possible. 

Avon failed completely to be describable by any of the limited terms of military assessments and he was equally baffling on a personal level. He neither welcomed my presence on the ship nor apparently resented it. I was used to being the object of desire or admiration or fear or jealousy or at the very least respect; I wasn’t used to being treated as part of the furniture. 

As I had predicted, everyone quickly acknowledged my superior strategic and tactical skills, and although we made our plans collectively, from the start I commanded the flight deck. The exception was on those occasions when Avon decided to take command, at which point he’d merely start issuing orders instead of following them and everyone would start doing what he said instead of listening to me. To a militarily trained mind it was intolerably chaotic and aggravating, to the rest of the crew it was apparently just the way things were done. I had absolutely no idea how to handle it. When I tried cornering him afterwards and telling him what I thought of him he turned away without a word halfway through. 

I remember feeling quite a lot of anger towards Avon at that time. After what I’d done for him to recover Liberator, I thought we’d have some sort of bond of respect at least and hopefully friendship. That smile we’d shared when we’d succeeded in taking back the ship would be the start of it. For Avon it seemed that it had been the end. 

After I’d joined the crew, after I was putting all my talents at their disposal, I wanted a bit more from him than to be treated as a convenient substitute to keep the command seat warm during the boring bits. Avon considered Liberator his personal property- that much was clear. The rest of us were merely allowed to do his bidding when he needed us and to play with the ship when he was busy with other matters. 

My temper wasn’t exactly helped by his bloody clothes. In the military there had been uniforms but afterwards I’d got used to a little flamboyance as everyday wear. Pirates ought to look like pirates, after all, and Liberator’s wardrobe room obliged with flowing shirts and a rather fine waistcoat. One never knew who one might meet and have to impress. 

Rather than dressing to impress any potential allies and enemies, however, Avon’s clothes suggested more that he thought he might have to unexpectedly pick them up in a particularly seedy location and have rather kinky sex with them. All that leather clearly wasn’t for any of the others’ benefit so I thought for a while that maybe it was for mine but if it was he certainly wasn’t following up on it. Cold, practical and dismissive; I got nothing else from him and his attitude didn’t improve my temper at all. 

I became more and more arrogant and at times quite embarrassingly belligerent. I may even have threatened him once or twice. Avon didn't even have the decency to get annoyed back. He merely glanced at me as if I was a defective component in one of his computer wirings, made some dismissive remark and then ignored me.

That was the superficially functioning but personally unsatisfactory state of affairs on Liberator a few weeks after I'd come aboard. From a group of three and two strangers trying to adapt to living together in a confined space we had shaken down quite quickly into an apparently sociable little community, with communal meals, games and a (mostly) collective approach to tackling the various adversities that we encountered. 

Seething underneath this apparent camaraderie, however, was my inability to establish full control of the group, my failure to either befriend or dominate the other alpha male on board and my frustration with having the best ship in the galaxy but no clearer objectives than whatever happened to come into anyone's head that day, plus, undoubtedly, the apparently unscratchable itch that came from watching Avon parade around in tight leather trousers daily for absolutely no good reason at all. Looking back now it seems clear to me that a combination of all these may possibly go at least some way to explaining how I was about to get everything so disastrously wrong at Kairos.


	3. Chapter 3

Kairos had been at the back of my mind for a very long time. There is something about the close physical presence of a fortune in an easily transportable, uncounted, unidentifiable form that gets even the most loyal and unimaginative Federation citizen briefly wondering if there is any way to get his hands on some. At the time of my posting guarding the shuttle transport of the harvest shortly after I graduated, I still considered myself loyal and the thought I put into how some Kairopan crystals might be induced to change hands was merely theoretical, an exercise in imagination. Or so I told myself, anyway.

The most obvious temptation was the small amount needed to render oneself rich. A handful would do it, a handful of a variable crop that had to pass through several hands and to several places before it came to be assessed precisely and only thereafter meticulously accounted for. I don’t know if anyone did get away with a handful occasionally. The Federation wouldn’t have told us that and they probably wouldn’t even have known. What they did tell everyone involved with the harvest, in great detail, was about the procedures put in place to stop people walking away with that fistful of riches and the consequences for those who tried it and were caught.

They were very tight procedures (and unpleasant consequences) and even after a day or so’s thought I couldn’t see any way around them, which happened to be exactly the conclusion that the Federation wanted me to reach. I don't like being thwarted though, not even theoretically, so I tried thinking “outside the box” as the old expression goes. Can’t take a handful, less is not worth the risk, but what about more? The idea of taking the whole crop, so much more wealth than any one person could possibly need, tickled me, even though it was impractical -I’d need a ship and crew good enough to take out the defenders, take over the armed carrier without destroying it and get away from the inevitable pursuit cleanly. 

It was just an idea then, something to pass the time. I was finding being a junior lieutenant, with just about enough authority to decide which order my men should stand watch in, very boring after the constant challenges of the Academy. The Federation, after a couple of unpublicised but highly embarrassing disasters, had at that time adopted a slow promotion strategy for new officer graduates. Put simply, they decided to wait and see whether we turned out to be crazy or disloyal when faced with actual combat or real power _before_ they handed us a lot of ships, troops and live weapons to play with. The only concession, I was told, to my impressive Academy test scores was the identity of my senior officer. Jarvik had already gained an almost embarrassing number of commendations after a series of brilliant and unexpected victories. If there was anywhere a talented young lieutentant could make a name for himself despite the limitations of his rank, it would be under Jarvik’s command. 

Over the next year and with my new commander's help my name was duly made, though not even Jarvik's inspired tactics and bizarre theories could make some of our postings interesting. The harvest at Kairos was vitally important to the Federation which was why they'd sent Jarvik there but since no-one was actually trying to steal the crop that year it turned out very dull. During the downtime on such assignments I spent a lot of time talking with my commander who seemed to like me. I learned a great deal about strategy which stood me in good stead thereafter and about Jarvik's theories on the meaning of life which fortunately even then I was mature enough to have the sense to ignore. 

Rather unfortunately as it transpired the link between Kairos and my old commander was nowhere near my thoughts as I presented my plan to the rest of the Liberator crew. What was foremost in my mind was the need to do something to break what I thought of as the deadlock with Avon. One clean, safe, brilliant and very profitable operation would be all it took. Then I could name my own terms for leading Liberator. I already knew what most of those terms would be.

It wasn’t hard to persuade the others to do it. The plan was a good one and I’d kept it fresh all these years, monitoring every minor change to Federation procedures at Kairos and keeping an eye on a variety of black markets where the crystals could be sold. It had become not so much an obsession but a kind of luck charm. “When I do Kairos,” I’d say to myself when things weren’t going well as an independent. “When I do Kairos, then none of this will matter any more.” It never once occurred to me in all those years that I might do Kairos and fail. 

This was the plan to take the harvest at Kairos;  
1\. Destroy all defensive Federation ships in the area.  
2\. Teleport on board the loaded shuttle.  
3\. Kill or incapacitate all people aboard (original plan, modified on discussion to kill or incapacitate all armed or hostile people aboard)  
4.Maneuvure shuttle to Liberator bay and unload Kairopan.  
5.Leave  
6\. Distribute Kairopan/proceeds of sale as preferred between crew members and discuss the future. My intention was to persuade those crew members who were amenable to retire to somewhere safe, luxurious and most importantly off my ship, now that I had money to hire a rather more effectively piratical crew. I suspected I wouldn’t buy Avon off Liberator for a paltry few million credits but I was rather hoping that Cally at least would go. As for Vila, I had absolutely no intention of allowing him to stay but I doubted that would be a problem. He’d have money to spare and Liberator life clearly didn’t suit a coward.

This is what happened;  
1\. I destroyed all defensive ships in the area. Or rather, I destroyed the three ships set up to make me think that that I had destroyed all the defensive ships in the area.   
2.We teleported on board the loaded shuttle.  
3.We killed or incapacitated all the armed and hostile people aboard, with the notable exception of the ones we missed who were hiding with the Kairopan supplies and who took us captive at gun point. At which point Avon, who had as far as I’d been aware chosen to stay on the ship to play with his rock, turned up, mowed them down and chided me coldly for overlooking the obvious.  
4\. We maneuvured the shuttle to Liberator bay and unloaded the Kairopan. Shortly thereafter the soldiers concealed in the Kairopan containers emerged and took Liberator off me without a single shot being fired. 

We ended up teleported to the surface of a soon to be deadly planet while Servalan sauntered arrogantly around my beautiful ship. My old and now clearly quite insane commander came down and whupped my arse in single combat in front of my fascinated crew for no better reason than because he could. Finally, when I had absolutely no idea of how to save us from mass obliteration from orbit it was Avon’s inspiration (and his stupid piece of rock) that got us back to Liberator and away but without a single crystal of Kairopan to show for our efforts. 

There were no immediate recriminations aboard Liberator. When I came back to the flight deck after a quick shower and change (I didn’t want them to think I was hiding though I had never felt such a desire to hide) they were discussing Avon’s rock and what might be done with it as if that were the only significant event that had happened that day. I couldn’t understand how they could care so little about the fortune lost or the man who had lost it for them. I had no explanation for their apparent forbearance and because I was furiously angry with myself and they should have been too I couldn’t help but distrust their indifference.

Younng, arrogant and desperate to prove myself the "most astute space warfare commander in the galaxy" as Avon had so sarcastically called me, I had no way to comprehend that for my shipmates my failure at Kairos was not the unthinkable collapse of a fifteen year old dream of near infinite riches with a hefty dose of personal defeat and humiliation at both Avon and Jarvik's hands. For them it was just another mostly unsuccessful day that everyone had nevertheless managed to live through with at least the advantage of an artificial sapient rock to come away with. 

I did have no trouble grasping that two dreams had died that day. I was not going to be ceded outright command of Liberator by general acclaim on the grounds that I was obviously so much more suitable than Avon was at keeping them alive. If Avon hadn't taken over command down on Kairos we'd all have been dead. If Avon hadn't done the things that only Avon was capable of, we'd all be dead. 

I didn't mourn my dreams long; a few sleepless nights, as I remember. I was naturally resilient, I'd got nobody actually killed and there was still plenty to occupy us. If Jarvik had lived then I don't think the others would have been able to stop me taking Liberator after him, but there was no possibility of revenge or recovery of pride there. I'd looked down on his dead body. As for Avon, I could hardly call him out for being either brilliantly competent or obviously unimpressed with me. 

I wasn't however prepared to stand aside completely and let Avon have Liberator as his personal fiefdom. Kairos wasn't the end of conflict between us, it was just the end of my assumption that I was inevitably going to win. 

Kairos left a streak of bitterness in me that was alien to my generally sunny disposition. It wasn't going to last long; alien invasions seldom do, but while it lasted it was going to cause rather more trouble between myself and the rest of Liberator's people than my mere failure to win them a fortune had done.


	4. Chapter 4

"The faster you go, the more trouble you find. I call it Liberator's first law."

"Spare us the others. Philosophy isn't your strong suit, Tarrant." Avon said. "Given recent events I really have no idea what might be."

He didn't lift his head from his console to see if the barb struck home as he often did. He was too worried about the news to really care about putting me down. After passing close to a sun with a bizarre and as far as we could tell unique radiation field Zen had reported the crystals that powered our main blasters had disintegrated, our offensive capacity seriously reduced. 

Fortunately we were in a sector that had been an old stomping ground of mine a couple of years before when I was pirating. "I know a lot of people round here. I'll put out a few feelers, see where we can get some more."

Avon did lift his head then and I bridled inwardly at the doubt in his eyes, but all he said was "Do it then."

It was some balm to my shattered post-Kairos pride to be able to put in the communicator calls to old friends and rivals. "This is Del Tarrant of Liberator" was an exceptionally satisfying way to start a conversation. Avon fled the flight deck after a few minutes, claiming that he couldn't bear the banality of my conversations. I didn't mind at all. After I had the place to myself I didn't need to be quite so careful about what I said and it was more than possible that a few people may have come away with the impression that Liberator was my ship. It didn't do any harm and after all I really had had a hell of a week. 

I was even more pleased when an old contact came back to me a mere few hours after I'd started to say that there was an offer of exactly what we needed and all they wanted in return was to borrow Vila, who apparently had a bit of a reputation of his own, for a few hours. Problem solved, quickly, cheaply and efficiently. So much for Kerr Avon's doubts, I thought. This at least would not go wrong.

I'm the first to admit that I made mistakes when it came to the deal but (despite later accusations) lack of preparation wasn't really the issue. There wasn't much information on file about the planet of the people offering the trade but I did some background checks nevertheless. I contacted people on the developed planets in the same star system and talked to them. There had been no aggression reported from their neighbour for as long as local records held. Occasional visitors to the planet reported a quiet primitive people without weapons or any interest in outsiders. I couldn't quite see what a primitive people would want with Vila's particular skillset but in my experience everyone liked to describe the planet next door as "primitive". It probably just meant they didn't have space travel.

When I teleported down to discuss the deal I found much what my research had led me to expect. The two men who met me showed what I took to be a stilted discomfort about talking to an outsider taken to the point of outright xenophobia but I'd seen more fight in a blancmange. They understood what I needed and they had the crystals; they showed me one. Given their obvious lack of any martial prowess I could see why they were reluctant to bring the rest within my reach before they had what they needed. 

I could also understand their insistence that Vila go down alone and unarmed. I'd frightened these poor people to near speechlessness just by turning up with a sidearm. It must have been dire need that had driven them to recruit an alien specialist. 

It all checked out. It all fit. I wasn't naive, I wasn't an amateur. I'd been trading contraband while Kerr Avon was still living in a safe quiet Dome sitting on his arse writing computer code and had probably never so much as held a gun in his hand. I knew a dozen ways to be double crossed and I wasn't going to fall for any of them. 

Would Avon have suspected that the people he was dealing with were being forced into being front men for a bunch of particularly savage pirates whilst actually using those pirates to gain access to their own ancestral heritage? Of course not. Would he have walked away from the deal just because Vila got cold feet and said he didn't want to go? Damn right he wouldn't. It's ironic that while no-one even thought to reproach me for the genuine mess that I made of Kairos, which failed, everyone had an axe to grind about my (mostly) perfectly reasonable actions to deal with the desperate state of Liberator's weapons which did in the end succeed. 

Enough. There are too many autobiographies thick with self justifications. I promised myself that I wouldn't do that yet here I am, arguing my corner as if the judgement of strangers twenty years after the event matters to me. Let me tell you what actually happened. That is, after all, the whole purpose of telling you anything at all.

I agreed the deal without consulting the others as to terms. I agreed that Vila would go down alone, unarmed and with no surveillance equipment. My professional assessment of the situation was that the planet was safe and as far as I was concerned that should be quite sufficient. I needed a win to get back some standing with the others and this wasn't anything dangerous like Kairos, just a business deal.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. When Vila refused to go I should have called in everyone else. We could have persuaded him between us, maybe amended the terms of the deal to the point where he would have felt sufficiently safe. But I didn't want to fail again and I definitely didn't want Avon to take over and be given the credit, so I kept the matter in my own hands and put a little pressure on the dislikeable little thief instead. 

It wasn't as if what I was asking was unreasonable- the people he would be working for were simple, unaggressive people- and it was well past time that Vila made some contribution to Liberator's well being instead of just hanging around being negative. And if I was a bit extravagant in claiming that the others would be unconcerned if I threw Vila off, well, right then I thought that if they had any sense unconcerned was exactly what they should be. If the man wouldn't pull his weight when it mattered then what use was he to any of us? 

Vila went, protesting. No-one spoke up to tell him he need not go. Our need for those crystals trumped their consciences as well as mine but it didn't stop them laying into me for my methods when he was out of the room and again as soon as he was off the ship. I felt the injustice of that keenly and it didn't make me inclined to accept their criticism. After all when he returned safely with the crystals I was sure I would be entirely vindicated. 

It was at that point that Avon got angry. It's quite difficult to explain what Avon angry is like. I'd pushed him in the hope of some sort of reaction often enough and had nothing back but dry disdain. It was genuine anger too, not manufactured for the occasion. I think he knew as soon as he threatened me that his emotions had driven him to make a mistake. I wasn't the sort of man who could possibly back down after that and for all his claim that a pilot was easily replaced I don't think he really wanted to try and kill me over Vila of all people. 

As for me I felt an odd sense of relief that we were finally on ground that I understood even if I had no idea why we'd reached it that day and on this issue rather than any other. Avon was at last behaving like the alpha rival that he undoubtedly was. I snarled something defiant back at him. I don't even remember what, just something scornful. A wordless noise would have conveyed the same information at that point. His response was another threat. Cally tried to intervene but it was only Vila's call from the planet that distracted us temporarily from the challenge. It was the discovery that our supposed payment had been rigged to kill us that changed the situation completely. 

I wouldn't have missed Vila much if he'd never returned but I have always recognised my responsibilities as a leader. Something had gone wrong with my deal and he was quite obviously in danger. I really didn't need the others to tell me that, though they did anyway. I reluctantly abandoned the rather promising fight that had been developing on the flight deck and turned all that surging testosterone to the cause of making the people down there who'd double crossed me sorry. At least I would have done if Avon had let me go down. There wasn't much point in trying to defy him; someone had to operate the teleport and it was clear from the expression on Dayna and Cally's faces that they had no intention of favouring my orders over his. 

There are few more unpleasant experiences than having to wait helplessly while someone else puts themselves in danger trying to clear up the mess you've made because they don't think you're adequate to the task. By the time Avon returned with the news that Bayban had Vila and that therefore his situation was worse than anyone had imagined I felt not so much worry as overwhelming relief that I could finally do something. 

It worked out all right in the end. I hit Bayban which was less satisfying than hitting Avon would have been but no doubt a great deal safer. Vila was recovered (with crystals). My apology didn't seem to redeem me much in his eyes but then that hadn't been its main purpose. I wanted no debts outstanding on this ship.

It was very late ship's time when I finally conceded that this was going to be yet another sleepless night. My quarters seemed cramped so I went for a walk around the quiet ship, ending up, inevitably, at the flight deck. I knew that Avon usually spent his night watches working on projects with Zen and Orac but tonight he was only sitting very still on the sofa watching the slowly moving star field on the screen. He didn't turn his head as I came in.

"Don't tell me. You've come to finish what I started earlier." His voice was neither hostile nor scathing, just unemotional. 

I might have had something of the kind in mind in coming there I suppose, but it takes two to fight and nothing about the atmosphere in that room suggested brawling.

"I couldn't sleep," I told him foolishly, as if he'd care.

He turned his head then, his eyes meeting mine. "It's a common enough side effect of a guilty conscience, I'm told." 

"I'm not feeling guilty. We needed those crystals. I may have been a little over zealous, that's all."

"Over zealous," he said thoughtfully, looking back at the screen. "Yes, I've known a few Federation officers use that description for themselves. It doesn't sound too bad, does it? Rolls off the tongue. Over zealous. Did you ever meet Space Commander Travis during your short but glowing military career, Tarrant?"

"A couple of times," I said reluctantly. Travis had been notorious for excessive cruelty. "I never served under him."

"Over zealous was I believe the description used at his court martial. To explain all the bodies." He looked straight at me again. "You may want to find yourself a phrase less reminiscent of Federation military brutality to describe your bullying now you're supposedly on our side."

I would have dearly liked to lose my temper then but I knew he was right. The lingering taste of the words was sour and I couldn't quite believe that I'd been stupid enough to use them to him. “Point taken.” I said shortly. He raised an eyebrow at that, as if I’d surprised him, if only very slightly. 

“There are sleeping tablets in the med room,” he said. 

He had probably just been trying to get rid of me but I rashly took it as an olive branch and chose to accept it. I told you I liked people. I walked over to the sofa, sat down next to him. “I find a bit of conversation usually has the same effect and I won’t be half asleep tomorrow.”

Avon had stiffened a little at my proximity. “Find someone else to talk to. I’m busy.”

“No you’re not. You were watching the screen when I came in.” 

“I was thinking.”

“About what?”

“This is not going to be a conversation,” he said sharply. “Why don’t you go back to bed, Tarrant.”

“It’s rather too empty for comfort.” More habit that thought and I could have bitten my tongue straight after. A stupid pick up line was the last thing I’d wanted to try that night on Kerr Avon of all people. I stood up abruptly before I could be shot down. “On second thoughts, I think yes it’s time for bed. Goodnight Avon.” I was halfway across the room already. 

As I reached the door there was a neutral “Goodnight” from behind me. Not to my great surprise, I didn’t get much sleep for the rest of the night either.

I don’t think my brief indiscretion told Avon anything he didn’t already know. We’d been living in close proximity for quite a while by then and he was never exactly unobservant. 

It didn’t seem to matter much anyway, since two days later he reluctantly told us a little about what he had been thinking. There had been a woman, apparently. He didn’t say ’love’ but his eyes burned when he talked about hunting down her killer. I've always been a sucker for romances. What could I do but pledge my support?


	5. Chapter 5

When you witness things that you know damn well no-one should have been there to see it’s often best to pretend they didn’t happen. Anna Grant was Avon’s story and not part of mine, whatever I’d seen. He never talked to me about it so I never really found out what any of it meant to him. I could speculate, but this is Avon we’re talking about. I probably wouldn’t even get close.

We left Earth sharpish after that and went back to roaming around looking for things to do. I was mildly cheered by the discovery that Avon had managed to have at least one apparently meaningful relationship (from his side at least) though simultaneously disheartened by the suspicion that he’d probably now sworn off so much as liking another human being for life. 

I don’t want to give the impression that I was mooning hopelessly after Avon at this time. It wasn’t anything nearly as serious as that. There was just no-one else on the ship that I could imagine getting involved with and I was unused to being single for so long. I found Avon attractive physically and intriguing mentally and if he wouldn’t fight and yet wouldn’t back down then I had to think about something else to do with him. After three months I hadn’t even made a serious pass at him which shows just how low my expectations of success must have been. It was an occasional late night fantasy thing, that’s all.

In accordance with Liberator’s First Law we found plenty of interesting things out there and most of them tried to kill us. After a few extremely close encounters (and with the exception of Vila who I still regarded as basically a waste of Liberator’s air supply) the rest of the crew became the people I relied upon to stay alive. I had long since discarded my opinion of Cally as weak or Dayna as undisciplined. We’d had each other’s backs too often for that. 

As for Avon, we hadn’t stopped quarrelling. He was still quick to override me at the slightest opportunity and now that I had moreorless got used to the idea that Liberator was going to basically function as a democracy whether I liked it or not I wasn’t prepared to have him ignore our opinions when it suited him. 

I accused him in one quite spectacular row of being jealous because I was so much more successful that he was. Given that we were now both in exactly the same situation I’m not sure how I could have reached that conclusion but I know I meant it at the time. I threw other things at him too, a catalogue of his failures, but not Anna and not Blake. I was angry but I wasn’t cruel, at least not where Avon was concerned. 

He relied with chilly insults to my intelligence, nothing as personal as my attacks but calculated to fan the flames of my temper. If we’d been alone we might have fought that time but the women weren’t prepared to indulge us. It was probably just as well. I was used to brawling but I’m not sure that Avon knew how to fight sub-lethally. It would have been embarrassing to have had to kill him in self defence when all I had really wanted to do was to punch him on the nose a couple of times.

After Kairos and the crystal deal I’d quietly backed down from claiming outright command of Liberator. At first it was a matter of policy; I thought I’d better re-establish my credentials first. After a while I stopped thinking about it. Liberator worked well as it was, barring the regular outbreaks of Avon’s highhandedness. The others usually had something valuable to contribute to planning (again excluding Vila) and soon I wouldn’t have dreamed of putting together a plan that involved the crew without consulting them. I could learn from my mistakes and I did. It didn’t stop me from rushing off on my own on a few occasion, of course. I couldn’t always bear to wait for the slow democracy to come to its careful and safe conclusions.

 

“Where are we going?” I’d woken to the feel of Liberator’s change in acceleration and scrambled quickly to get to the flight deck. 

“We’re following that ship, apparently.” Dayna gestured at the screen. She didn’t sound happy about it.

I glanced at the small glowing light in the centre. “Zen, magnification of forward screen. Ah. Interesting.”

“Servalan,” Dayna confirmed.

“Zen, how many ships are in the region of two hundred thousand spacials?”

“Two ships are in the specified region.”

I was used to its pedantry by now. “How many excluding Liberator?”

“One ship excluding Liberator is in the specified region.”

“So she’s alone.” I glanced at Avon whose eyes were on the screen. “Aren’t we going to blast her to pieces?”

“No,” he said. “We’re going to follow her.”

“Follow her where?”

He smiled then, briefly. “I’ve no idea. But Orac tells me that she’s made arrangements for the governance of the Federation for an absence of up to several weeks. Wherever she’s going it could take a while.”

What would take Servalan away from her power base for that long? Something she couldn’t avoid doing. A threat that absolutely had to be countered, maybe, and with that I had it. Avon thought she was going after Blake.

If he didn’t want to jinx the hope by saying it out loud, I wouldn’t either, but I backed his decision against the protests of the others. Democracy implies an even spread of power but we never really had that. On the rare occasions that Avon and I were united in purpose we tended to ignore everyone else. It was only if one of us was isolated that we were forced to listen. 

So we followed Servalan’s ship. After a week or so it became clear that even the most circuitous route would bring us nowhere near the region of Star One. As we moved further and further away from the area where Blake had got lost I don’t think Avon gave up hope entirely but he certainly got more bad tempered. 

We were all somewhat cranky on that trip. With the need not to lose Servalan paramount we couldn’t stop to investigate the sort of oddities that had kept us busy (and nearly killed us) for the last few months. There was nothing to do but sit on the ship and wait. Everyone’s capacity for cheerful smalltalk ran out fairly quickly and we nearly strangled each other over the boardgames until we finally agreed to stop playing. The military could always have found some makework to fill long downtimes even if it was only kit inspections and cleaning the toilets. When I tried introducing some suitably timewasting checks and inspections on Liberator the others threatened to put me off the ship. 

Some people had projects. Dayna was usually happy messing around in her weapons lab all day. Avon spent a lot of time closeted with Orac. Cally, Vila and I tended to be the ones at a loose end, thrown together. I liked Cally. There were worse things than idling away the time in her company. Unfortunately the worse thing had a habit of turning up and spoiling the party.

Vila complained about Avon and the trip a great deal with the infuriating consequence that I then couldn’t and had to pretend that I thought this was a good idea. In my opinion it had stopped being a good idea about 9 days in but I couldn’t possibly admit that in front of Vila. 

Things came to a bit of a head one evening three weeks in. There had been a minor meteor strike on the ship’s hull and I was sufficiently bored that I had decided to take a completely unnecessary trip outside to check that the autorrepair function had worked properly. It had been a long and tiring external inspection with of course nothing interesting to report and no one else was particularly grateful for my efforts. When I finally got out of the environmental suit I wanted nothing but to eat and sleep. Unfortunately Vila was in the galley first.

“Tarrant,” he started. “You’ve got to tell Avon this is ridiculous. We can’t keep on like this.”

I was tired, and tired of his complaints, and unutterably tired of the whole journey. “Get out,” I told him. “I want to eat in peace.”

“Hey!” he protested. “You can’t tell me what to do!”

I seized his plate from under his hands. “Take this,” I advised him, “and leave, before I throw it in the incinerator.”

He pushed his chair back and stood up. “I’ll have that,” and he snatched the plate back and headed for the door. There he paused. “I don’t know why you left the Federation military,” he told me. “That uniform must have fit you perfectly.” 

I paid him no heed, but as I started to make myself supper another voice came from the door.

“I don’t know why you left the Federation either,” Avon said. “But I think it’s time I found out.” 

I wasn’t expecting to have this conversation out of the blue. “I wanted freedom and justice, of course,” I said lightly.

“No.” Avon’s tone was absolute. “Vila’s right, the uniform fit far too well for that. Try again.”

I had a couple of stories that I had used when this question came up in the past. I didn’t fancy trying them on Avon, not when he had Orac as backup. For all I knew he’d already read up on me in the Federation records and this was just a test of some sort. 

“All right,” I said stiffly. “My brother committed a crime but didn’t stay around for the punishment. Federation policy in cases of those kinds, as you no doubt know, is to punish the families. I received a temporary demotion by one rank. It was more symbolic than practical but I didn’t think it was fair, so I left.”

“With a pursuit ship?”

“Severance pay,” I said cheerfully. 

“I see.” Avon said. “The system that had given you everything gave you a slap on the wrist and you threw a tantrum and walked out.” 

“If you like,” I told him. “I prefer to think of it as a matter of principle.” 

He just snorted derision at that. “So you too committed a crime and didn’t stay around for the consequences. What did they do to your family this time?”

I could feel the muscles stiffen across my back. “Our parents were exiled to their estates in the Outer Worlds. I managed to see them a couple of times when I was smuggling in the region. ” And because he couldn’t help but find out if he was curious, “They died in a decompression incident two years ago.”

Avon nodded. “Decompression accidents do happen,” he said neutrally. 

“I didn’t say accident, I said incident.” I said harshly. “The investigators I hired concluded that there was a 80% chance of it being suicide, 18% murder and 2% accidental.” 

“And what happened to your brother?”

“I have absolutely no idea. I imagine he’s probably dead too. Now if the interrogation’s over may I get on with my supper?”

“Of course.” He helped himself to the drink he’d no doubt come in for and left.

 

You may be feeling a little shortchanged by now. After all, this book is entitled “Memoirs of a Rebel”. So far I’ve told you about being an Academy hotshot, a military officer, a deserter and thief and now in Liberator a fugitive from the Federation and general wanderer but there’s been very little rebelling going on. It’s not how the stories have it, I know. Where’s our revolutionary zeal, our commitment to Blake’s ideals, our heroic stand on a dozen planets? Those things that everyone knows about Liberator’s crew?

This is what we were really like back then I’m afraid. The only freedom that concerned us was our own. We were quarrelsome, purposeless and occasionally downright mean. Vila scurried out of every room I entered for the rest of that trip unless the others were there to protect him. I should probably have felt bad about it but I think I would have had to like him at least a little for that, and I didn’t. 

 

Eventually we reached the invisible planet that was Servalan’s destination. By the time we worked out what was there Avon must have known that it wasn’t Blake that Servalan was after this time. He wanted to turn round and go back, have nothing to do with the place.

I’d had Servalan in my sights for 27 days. Twenty seven days we’d held back on killing her because we wanted to know what she was doing. Now Avon wanted to just walk away? There wasn’t a chance in hell of my going along with that. It had been a dire month and I was determined to get something out of the whole stupid trip. If nothing else, Servalan’s death would have to do. 

I took Vila with me because Orac told me I needed him. He panicked and screwed up. I had to retrieve him in the end from a group of unsavory convicts that he had decided that he much preferred to my company. He didn’t want to come. I got annoyed. I had a gun in my hand. I threatened him with it. 

I don’t have much in the way of justification for my actions, I’m afraid. If it’s any consolation I wouldn’t have dreamed of actually hurting Vila but I’m not sure that he was confident of that at time. When I realised what I’d just done I lowered the gun and walked away, leaving him to rejoin his new friends if that’s what he really wanted to do. I didn’t have the stomach to push him around any more. 

Perhaps that’s why Vila still came to find me after I’d been captured, brain scanned and locked up. Despite everything he did come. I didn’t really need him at that point but I definitely needed the gun he was carrying. Shortly afterwards he opened the door that let us rescue the others. By this point I was starting to feel very awkward indeed.

I’m fairly sure that Vila never told any of the others what I’d done down on that planet. I don’t know why not. He didn’t like conflict on board, so maybe that was it. Maybe he thought they’d agree with me. Maybe he realised I hadn’t meant anything by it. Maybe he really could forgive. Maybe he was used to keeping injustice and mistreatment to himself. Maybe telling other people had never helped him in the past. 

I was more careful around him after that. It wasn’t always that simple. I still didn’t like him much and it was too easy to be overbearing when he was irritating. But he had come to rescue me after I’d shoved a gun in his face and I knew that was worth something.

It was yet another excursion that we got nothing out of except our lives. This one had been far too long and our frustrations with the situation and each other far too great to just go back to business as usual. When Orac announced that the shipboard efficiency state had reached crisis point I don’t think anyone was surprised. Unfortunately Vila’s plan for a holiday was seriously misjudged. The Vandor Teal War turned out to be anything but pleasurably diverting.


	6. Chapter 6

My older brother Deeta was the least likely professional killer imaginable. When we grew up together on my parents ' estates in Earth I was always the competitive one, the one who'd end up in fights with the other children over the respect I was entitled to. I thought I was entitled to a great deal of respect so there was plenty of fighting. Deeta was attractive and sociable and people liked him. He liked books and his pictures and showing off just a little but always in a nice way that didn’t get people’s backs up. I never quite got the hang of that. I don't remember ever expecting my big brother to defend me as others sometimes did. I fought my own battles and let Deeta be. 

There was no question of Deeta applying for the Academy. He'd have been hopelessly out of place in the military though he and I been taught marksmanship from fron an early age and he was remarkably skilled at shooting anything inanimate. He wanted to be an artist though, oldstyle paint and canvas no less, and our parents indulged his dream. From what I overheard people say his stuff must have been good but not brilliant, which I imagine he found as frustrating as I would have done. He persevered though - he studied arts and my mother gave him his own studio to work in. 

I used to hang out there sometimes after school. I liked the smell of the paints and Deeta's laconic conversation as he dabbed at his canvas. I'd always liked to be with Deeta and he was always tolerant of me, though I was three years younger than him and no doubt often a pain in the neck. He painted me a few times, complaining that I wouldn't sit still. God knows where those canvases are now. 

I don't recall my brother ever criticising my choice of the Academy, though I knew his opinion of the military. He wasn't one for pushing his opinions on other people. Live and let live was his motto. A bit ironic as it turned out. 

Once I joined the Academy I didn't see that much of my family and even less so after graduating. Every so often I'd go home for a visit and there Deeta would still be, his studio covering several floors now. He'd become an art dealer, not exactly a common occupation in the Federation but there were enough rich citizens to support a handful, as well as selling his own paintings. It was always good to see him though we sometimes found it a little difficult to find common subjects for conversation. My life was entirely military and his was art. He had a girlfriend by then. I wasn't sure what to make of her but she was probably all right really, I suppose, at least for Deeta. She didn't much like soldiers though and we didn't hit it off. 

Then I was told was that Deeta had killed someone in a dispute over a valuable painting. It seemed incredible. From what I know of the Federation now it seems probable that the incident was staged for political reasons; my mother was being talked about for a possible seat on the High Council at the time and the scandal naturally torpedoed her chances completely. 

Whether Deeta had killed anyone or not he'd certainly run. Word of him got to us a few months later; he was way past the Federation borders and operating as a gun for hire. How he went from artists to hired killer I still don't know. He was always fast and accurate with a gun; maybe away from my family's influence he'd found it was the only skill he had to make a living. Deeta had always been vividly imaginative but rather emotionally detached from the rest of the world. I imagine that helped too. 

Deeta's disgrace and my share of the family punishment were the triggers for my desertion from the Federation military. Despite that I never went to look for him afterwards even though I had a ship at my disposal by then. The average lifespan of a hired gun is very short- maybe I didn't want to find out that he was dead. Maybe I didn't know what I was going to make of this new lethal brother of mine, when I'd spent my entire life patronising him slightly as a great guy but no use in a fight. I don't know. I didn't look for him, anyway. I heard news of him again once, about three years later, and again I didn't go. 

I knew as soon as I saw him on the screen that I should have found him before. I needed to see him, but he wouldn’t meet me, not till afterwards. He went up against an opponent that was faster on the draw than he was and I was in his head when all the afterwards stopped. Seven years of killing people for money hadn’t changed him much. Under the reflexes and the strategy I could tell from the tone of his thoughts that he was still the gentle big brother that I’d loved so much. Far too gentle for the path he’d chosen. I was surprised he’d survived so long. 

Deeta spoke to me in the end, as he was dying, but he never got to hear my voice again. For Orac and Avon my “blood feud” was a strategy to defeat the Federation’s plans but for me it was real and terribly raw. Destroying the machine didn’t help. You can’t take vengeance on a machine. It was Servalan I blamed, and myself.

 

The knock on my door was unexpected. We didn’t tend to visit each other’s quarters; there was little enough privacy on the ship as it was. I sat up on the bed and signalled the door to open.

It was Avon, standing awkwardly in the doorway as the door slid aside.

“Come in,” I invited out of politeness. He shook his head.

“How much longer do you intend to wallow in guilt?” he asked. 

I sat up straighter, shocked. “What sort of question do you call that?”

“A simple one. It’s been five days. How much longer?”

“Grief, you heartless moron. Not guilt.” I snapped at him.

He shrugged at that. “Some of each, I imagine. Either way, when do you intend to snap out of it?”

I closed my eyes briefly, summoning my temper. “I’ve been standing my watches.”

“You’ve been doing little else. Zen says you’ve slept little and eaten less.”

“And why is Zen monitoring me?”

“Zen monitors everything on the ship. It makes considerably less distinction between components and crew than you might imagine.”

“Do you?” I asked Avon. “Is this visit an attempt to repair a faulty component? You don’t need to worry, Avon. I promise that I’ll eat, I’ll sleep and I’m be back at full efficiency in no time. Was that all?”

He paused before he spoke again. “You told me that you thought he was dead.”

“And now he is.” I said with a grim attempt at flippancy. “The universe likes tidying up its loose ends. That’s what Deeta was, a loose end. And now everything’s tidy again.” 

Avon frowned at me as if I were talking nonsense. “All your family are dead now?”

“As far as I know, yes. There might be a stray cousin or two roaming around but no doubt the universe can deal with them easily enough. There’s no one left for any of us to care about, Avon. Dayna’s family, mine, Cally’s whole planet. Your Anna. All gone. Only one person outside this ship matters. It’s just us and Servalan running round and round in circles forever more.” 

I saw the scowl deepen as I mentioned Anna but he kept silence until I’d finished. “There’s Blake,” he said. 

“Is there?” 

“There might be Blake,” he corrected. 

“We’ve got each other,” I said. “That’s all. And you and I are not much good for each other, are we?” 

“You’re still wallowing,” Avon said. “Get some sleep. Eat something. Conventional wisdom has it that things will look a little less bleak in the morning.”

“Do things ever look less bleak to you in the morning?” I asked.

He didn’t need to think about that one. “No. But I keep going anyway. I’ll see you on the flight deck tomorrow. Goodnight Tarrant.”

Keep going anyway. That I could understand. After all what else was there to do? When Avon had gone I went to the medbay for those sleeping tablets, took one and slept for ten hours without dreams. Then I went back to the flight deck and the others. They and my vengeance on Servalan were all I had left now, after all.


	7. Chapter 7

This time there was no door to knock on. The Scorpio alcoves we’d converted into sleeping areas didn’t come with luxuries like walls and privacy. Avon was lying on his bed which filled most of the space available. It felt to me like everything on Scorpio was designed to remind us of how much we'd lost. 

“What do you want?” He was looking up at the low ceiling. I glanced around; the others were busy discussing something at the controls, far enough away not to overheard us. 

“To return a favour,” I told him. “It's been a bit longer than five days. I'm not going to tell you to snap out of it but I do think it's time you told someone what happened on Terminal.” 

“Do you?” His voice was dry. “What difference can it make now?” 

“Until you tell me I can't possibly know,” I pointed out. “You asked us to trust you and we did, more or less, You told us we'd be given the whole story but if you ever really made a record of that promised explanation it disintegrated with Liberator. We lost a friend and a ship on Terminal and only you know why we were there at all.” 

I paused. Avon hadn't so much as moved his head. “Was it Blake?” I demanded. “Servalan said that he was dead, that she'd tricked you somehow.” 

“No, it wasn't Blake,” he said, and for a long moment I thought that was all I would get, but he finally sighed and sat up. “But I thought it might be. You'd better sit down I suppose.”

I sat on the end of the bed since there was nowhere else. Avon sat in the middle. “I got a voice message from Blake,” he started abruptly. “It couldn't be proved false. Orac and I were in agreement - it was almost certainly a trap. I decided to go and see anyway.”

“But not to tell us?” 

“Orac put my chances of survival at very low. Those odds didn't improve significantly if I brought anyone else along. It was logical to go alone. I doubted that you lot would agree.”

“It was a bit more than altruistically keeping us out of danger though, wasn't it? After all you stuck a gun in my stomach and Cally was sure that you meant it.” 

“I did mean it.” He sounded almost as tired as he'd been when we got him back from the Fed interrogators. “If killing one of you would have stopped the others from following me it was the optimal action. I calculated that you'd back down, anyway. You might be rash but somehow you've survived this long. You must have some basic instinct for self preservation.”

“I must introduce you to the concept of flesh wounds,” I told him, “in case you ever feel the need to shoot me again.” My own flesh was crawling a little at the way he spoke so easily about killing me. 

He shook his head. “I needed control of Liberator with no one to challenge me, not you charging out of the med unit half an hour later fit and well and more bullish than ever.” 

“So you would have killed me rather than give up this faint hope of Blake?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice empty of malice or apology. 

“Would you mind telling me why?”

“I think I would mind, yes,” he said calmly. 

“I see.” For a moment I really thought I did. “Roj Blake’s a lucky man,” 

He laughed at that, a cold laugh. “Not all that lucky. According to Servalan he’s dead. And by the way, your jealousy is completely misplaced, Tarrant. I can assure you that I have not ever been in love with Blake.”

I decided to save that one up to think about later. “So what happened on the planet?”

Avon’s voice was stiffer, “I was fooled into thinking that I’d spoken to Blake. It was remarkably well done. Then Servalan offered me a deal. Blake and everyone’s lives for Liberator.”

“One fiction and one lie,” I suggested.

“Precisely. I didn’t believe she’d let us live under any circumstances and I wasn’t going to give her my ship. I tried to get Liberator to leave. I’d figure out some way to get Blake and myself out of there afterwards. But half my crew had teleported down against my strict instructions and got themselves captured by then.” He scowled at me. “That complicated matters unnecessarily.”

“By then Liberator was dying,” I said. It still hurt to talk about it. “If I hadn’t known what was going on and overruled your attempt at heroic defiance then Servalan and her people would have never been able to teleport up and be killed. I expect if we’d all still been on the planet when the ship broke up in orbit she’d just have shot us and left.”

“Quite possibly,” Avon conceded. “Anyway, that’s all the story there is.”

“So,” I said, still aware of the others too close. “Servalan is dead. Blake is dead, Cally is dead and the Liberator is gone. I imagine you’re feeling a little rudderless at the moment, Avon.”

He smiled at that, a little bitterly. “Does it show?”

Of course it did. I wasn’t the only one of us who was worried about him, although I think my concern was probably the most personal, now Cally was gone. She’d always been better at handling Avon than the rest of us. I missed her daily for all sorts of reasons but Avon was one of the main ones. It felt at that moment like none of the rest of us had any sort of functional relationship with him and that was a bit unnerving. 

That at least was my excuse for trying. I had other reasons, of course, but apart from accidentally exposing my feelings in a rather embarrassing manner I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with those. At least Avon didn’t seem to feel the need to rip into me for it. My crush apparently didn’t do more than faintly amuse him. 

“What are we going to do?” I asked him.

“That depend on what you mean by ‘we’. You and I, or all of us?”

I was fairly sure he was teasing me now, which was at least rather better than his previous morose silence. “All right, I’ll bite. You and I.”

“You and I are going to continue to argue, I imagine, since you’re so very bad at seeing reason.” He stopped and it became clear that he wasn’t intending to add anything more.

“All of us, then.”

He sighed. “Defend what we hold, for the moment. There’s work to be done on Scorpio, further improvements. I need to fully get to grips with Slave’s programming. We don’t have a self repairing ship any more and we need to eat, obviously, so there are a lot of supplies to pick up from this place that Soolin’s taking us. And there’s the planet and the base. Xenon might have some useful resources.”

“Housekeeping,” I said without enthusiasm.

“It might keep us alive.”

“Alive for what, though?”

“I’m sure we’ll find out, sooner or later.” He stood up and walked over to correct Soolin’s attempt to use the scan equipment. 

I watched them for a moment. Soolin had joined us after discovering that her boyfriend was some sort of 200 year old emotional vampire who intended to kill her along with us on the basis that she’d be some sort of substitute for Cally . Shortly after that Avon had killed him. Scorpio had been his. Now she was ours. I wasn’t at all sure about Soolin. People who point a gun at me early in our acquaintance often have that effect on me. 

My main consolation was that Dorian clearly hadn’t trusted her either. The Slave onboard computer hadn’t recognised her voiceprint and she showed no real familiarity with Scorpio’s controls. I was pretty sure she was no pilot, which meant that she couldn’t possibly land the planethopper, which theoretically limited her ability to betray us in flight. 

Avon was at least looking slightly animated again. I thought he’d be all right, as much as any of us, anyway. We were all getting over the initial shock of loss. We had Scorpio; nothing like Liberator, of course, but at least unambiguously ours. I wasn’t exactly fond of her yet but she wasn’t quite as bad a ship to fly as she looked.

A few months before I would seriously have been thinking about jumping ship about now. There were far better uses for my considerable talents than flying a souped up planethopper on supply trips. My part share in the best ship in the galaxy had disintegrated in front of my eyes and with it any real prospect of fame and fortune with this lot. Avon could find a new pilot easily enough. I could steal myself a fast ship of my own and go back to pirating. Something like that anyway. 

Servalan was dead, and I’d had my share in causing that. Deeta was revenged. I was as much of a free agent as I’d ever been. Nothing would have been more natural than for me to walk away. I liked Dayna well enough but she wasn’t what I’d call a close friend. Vila was Vila; though he’d saved my life again by then I certainly didn’t relish the prospect of his company indefinitely. And Avon was no one’s friend and I owed him nothing. 

I told myself I’d maybe think about it later and then I pushed it firmly out of mind. I wasn’t going to go. 

A couple of hours later Avon, who had been talking quietly to Orac for some time, called us together. “I intend to monitor the resurgent Federation’s activity,” he told us. “We can do that in Scorpio, with Orac’s assistance.”

“What’s the point?” Vila asked. “It’s not like we can do anything about it in this old bucket. We should just move to the other end of the Galaxy and keep out of their way.”

“I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life keeping out of anyone’s way,” Avon told him coldly. “We need to pick our battles carefully, that’s all.”

“Battles?” Vila nearly choked. “Why are we fighting battles now? In case you haven’t noticed there are only five of us and Scorpio’s armaments are about as impressive as a child’s water pistol.”

“We have guns,” Soolin said. Dayna nodded.”And we can work on Scorpio’s systems. I’ve got some ideas already.” 

“I’m surrounded by homicidal maniacs,” Vila complained. He turned, uncharacteristically, to me. “You agree with me that this is crazy, don’t you, Tarrant?” 

I thought the idea of battles was crazy, all right, but I’d pretty much demanded that Avon find himself a purpose and this was apparently his decision. “People out there still think we’re rebels,” I said. “I guess we could try it out for size.”

“And end up measured for our coffins,” Vila muttered, but he shut up for a time after that. 

I found a quiet moment to talk to Avon on the flight deck when the others were down on planet restocking. “Finding something to do didn’t take you long, then.”

He glanced at me. “No.” 

“We could have used Liberator to cause absolute havoc. That would have been a fair bit easier than sneaking around counting beans now.”

“I wanted Liberator intact,” Avon said calmly, “more than I wanted vengeance on the Federation. I don’t care that much about Scorpio, which gives me rather more of a free hand.” 

“And Blake is dead,” I added. 

He nodded. “And Cally. And Servalan. And,” he paused, failed to finish the thought. “Well. When your dead outnumber your living it’s probably time to think about making a stand.” 

“Not too much of a stand,” I warned him. “I’m not ready to die yet. I still have people alive.” I paused briefly. “Well, someone, anyway.”

He smiled at that, his lopsided smile. “Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of getting myself killed any time soon.”

“And what about the rest of us?”

“Oh, I’m going to need a pilot.” He was still smiling. “Just keep on your toes, Tarrant. That will save me the trouble of having to replace you.”

“You don’t have to worry either,” I told him. “I always do.”

So we became slightly rebels again, or in my case for the first time. It was low key stuff for a while. We were mostly working on getting Scorpio up to scratch while Orac did the actual monitoring. 

Then the Federation started to take over worlds at an accelerated and inexplicable rate. One of them was Helotrix, and what I found when we went down there was about to change everything again.


	8. Chapter 8

I liked the idea of being a rebel at last.

After I’d gone AWOL from the military with my ship, moreorless on impulse, I hadn’t got any particular plan for making a living. The first good job I was offered was a smuggling one so I did that, and another, and another. Two years later I was still smuggling goods around the Outer Worlds and the nearby systems.

The money was enough to keep my ship repaired and to live quite comfortably, though not in anything like the luxury of my childhood home. It was a sociable sort of occupation, you got to know the people you worked with well and I didn’t have to kill people very often. After five years in the Fed military that last was a pleasant change. 

As a smuggler I had usually been carrying goods that someone else had stolen. Taking them direct from the cargo ships myself was an obvious next move; it cut out the middleman, I could use the same buyers at the other end and my profits went up significantly. So I turned pirate. Unfortunately cargo ships tended to have security and the number of people I had to shoot went up as well. It was a pity about the deaths but I didn’t care enough not to do it. It must have been around this time that my name shot up about two hundred places on the Federation Wanted List.

I’d always flown my ship solo, which limited my pirating opportunities rather. There weren’t that many cargo freighters which could be taken by a single attacker. I was reluctantly thinking about maybe having to take on a crew when I bumped into an acquaintance whose home system had just fallen out with a neighbour. She was out recruiting mercenaries for the war. The money was about what I was already making but I wouldn’t need to find my own targets or recruit a crew. I got slightly drunk with her that night and signed my ship up for the duration.

It was a nice little war, as wars go. Both sides had agreed to keep the fighting confined to space; no planetary bombardments, no attacks on population centres. Civilian casualties, as far as I knew, were limited to a couple of unfortunate civilian spacecraft and the fallout from the occasional crash and burn onto the planet surfaces. I took part in a few set piece battles and spent the rest of the time hunting down small military spacecraft like my own and running away from larger ones. It was far more fun than either carrying contraband or threatening cargo captains and I was rather sorry when after about six weeks our opponents surrendered. I went off and spent most of the money on a very entertaining if rather sleazy vacation for a month. When I got back I went looking for some more fighting. 

The next war I signed up for was a lot nastier from the start. After the first couple of days I was invited to a meeting of all the mercenary captains, maybe a dozen ships in total. We issued a statement to our military employers about the things we weren’t prepared to do- attack civilian targets, mostly. I like to think I’d have stood up for that on my own, if necessary, but I suppose I was fortunate not to have had to put that to the test. I’m afraid the system’s own military did quite a lot of fairly horrendous things in that war while we mercenaries ran around keeping the ‘legitimate military targets’ off their backs. But we weren’t called upon to attack civilians ourselves, and we got paid, so that was our concerns satisfied. 

After that I was a little more careful about what sort of mess I was letting myself in for. It didn’t always work; when people thought they were losing they tended to drop the ethics rapidly, but as far as I know I never again fought on a side that was quite as appallingly brutal as as that second one had been. And if you think that sounds like very faint justification for my actions indeed, well, I’m inclined to agree with you.

There were half a dozen more mercenary engagements over the next couple of years, from minor skirmishes up to one more full scale war that lasted about six months. I must have been pushing the odds of survival but I thought I was untouchable. I wasn’t planning to keep fighting other people’s wars indefinitely though. I wanted to do something else, something impressive. I just didn’t know what. 

I heard about Blake and Liberator and I though that sounded- I don’t know, romantic, probably. Fighting the Federation- now there was a battle worth taking on. But before I could do anything about my vague attraction to the idea of rebellion the aliens invaded. Forty eight hours later the ship I’d stolen years before was cinders, I was standing on the bridge of Liberator itself and Blake was gone.

So when Avon declared that we were going to take on the Federation, albeit in a cautious and limited fashion, I was loudly vocal in my support and rather adolescently eager to actually do something dangerously rebellious as soon as possible. The first real opportunity for some serious action was on Helotrix and I was insistent that I should be one of the ones to go. 

There wasn’t much resistance, to be fair. Vila wasn’t likely to protest at someone else getting the dangerous jobs, Soolin had the professional gunfighter’s natural resistance to getting involved in other people’s fights and Dayna was coming with me anyway. Avon gave me a strict lecture on not getting involved in whatever was down there but I’m not sure that he had the slightest expectation that I would heed it, not after Terminal. I think he just didn’t want to go down himself. I don’t think he was ready to have to talk to actual rebels yet, the sort of people who might know Blake’s name, not about losing Liberator, not about losing Blake and not while he had nothing to show for the last six months but a lot of running away. 

So I went, and yes, we got a bit involved in what was going on down there but it did no harm and maybe a bit of good. We found out how the Feds were taking back planets so fast, using a pacification drug called Pylene 50. If I’d come back when Avon told me to we wouldn’t have been able to report to him that Servalan was alive.

My thoughts about Servalan resurrected were mainly practical ones. Would she come after us, or would the loss of Liberator mean we were no longer of much interest? Should we go after her? She was dangerous, after all, and we were meant to be rebels now. What sort of resources did she have now? We thought she was behind the pacification drug; what else was she dabbling those long white fingers in? 

I wasn’t keen on the idea that Servalan had escaped death and I’d have happily rectified the position given a gun and her in my sights, but I think that mentally I’d laid poor Deeta to rest when I thought she’d died and I couldn’t find it in me to resurrect that anger now. While I still mourned Cally I couldn’t get aggrieved about the way Servalan had boobytrapped Terminal to try to kill us. After all we’d effectively sent her up to a boobytrapped Liberator to try to achieve the same result. In war the other side was out to kill you. I’d fought in enough wars to know that there was absolutely no point in taking it personally.

Avon took the news of Servalan’s continued existence very personally indeed. When we finally managed to persuade him to believe us he was white with rage. I’d never seen him anything like that emotional before and I’d been there when his old lover tried to kill him. I think her death had been the single consolation for the way he’d destroyed Liberator. Without that there was nothing but his own rash stupidity.

It was the second time Avon had lost far more than anyone else ever dreamed of having. The first had been the bank fraud when Anna had betrayed him. This time it was another woman’s lies. He’d killed Anna and now he intended to kill Servalan. 

I didn’t really approve. Avon was meant to be the rational one. I didn’t like the idea of him rashly seeking personal vengeance using Scorpio. None of us had blamed him for Liberator’s destruction. Nothing would bring her back, better just to shrug and move on.

We didn’t talk about it. There wasn’t really a good point at which to bring the subject up and Avon’s foul temper was mostly silent, though all too obvious to the rest of us. We tiptoed around him for a few days, tried not to argue with him and waited for the storm to blow over. 

That was a mistake. When Avon lost all vestige of patience and decided that we were going to shadow an asteroid into a system I should have said no. I was, after all, the pilot. It was my job to say no to stupid unnecessary risks and then to not do them. Instead I did exactly what Avon told me and flew Scorpio straight into two billion tons of rock. It was not one of my finest moments. Not one of Avon’s either, but he wasn’t at the controls. 

We survived, by the skin of our teeth, but we needed a replacement drive. Naturally we went in search of the fastest drive in existence, being developed on a planet run by a gang of unstable and obsessive spacecraft thieves. Avon’s mood had only worsened as a result of our crash and he decided to use Vila and Dayna as a distraction, but without telling them. I let him do that too. Flying into an asteroid hadn’t taught me any sense either. 

We got the drive, and the designer. We even got away from a plasma bolt although Avon had to incinerate the designer in her own drive to do it. We used our ‘faster than anything else in the galaxy’ drive to fly straight back to Xenon base and the others all disappeared into their separate rooms and didn’t come out for a long while. 

 

“I don’t want company,” Avon said. Each word was cold and distinct.

“I wasn’t offering it,” I said. “But if you need to punch someone I’m a reluctant volunteer. Just don’t break my nose, please. I don’t trust Scorpio’s medical facilities not to fix it crooked.”

He continued to scowl at me for a couple of seconds, then his face relaxed into tired and unhappy. “A tempting offer but I don’t think it will actually help the situation.”

“If it’s any help at all,” I said, “I can’t see that you had any alternative.”

“I keep thinking that Blake would have found one.” He sank back into a chair. 

I felt a sudden stab of dislike of Avon’s precious Blake. “So no one ever died on his watch, then?”

“Not like that.” Avon said. He looked up at me. “I know what Blake would have done. He would have pulled her out of there when she was done and trusted to luck to keep the the shields holding for a few more seconds. I can’t run Lib...” he caught himself, “Scorpio on luck that I don’t believe in.” 

“Please don’t start,” I told him. I thought Blake sounded like the worst sort of idiot, but then I really wanted to believe that Avon had had no choice. Any objectivity I’d ever had was slowly wearing off as far as our inglorious leader was concerned. 

“I really would like you to leave now,” he told me, without any particular heat. I nodded and left him alone with his thoughts.


	9. Chapter 9

I was a great deal fonder of Scorpio now that she was fast and manoeuvrable. She wasn’t Liberator but she was still fun. More fun in some ways; she needed a great deal of hands on piloting whereas Liberator’s automatic systems had always handled most of the actual flying. Slave had some automatics but they couldn’t keep up with the increase in power and speed that the stardrive had given us. I could, most of the time. 

Avon never volunteered compliments but I could tell that he’d come to realise just how good a pilot he’d got when I wasn’t flying into asteroids on his orders. The occasional snide comments about Jenna stopped. Jenna had never flown Scorpio. This ship was mine.

Scorpio was small enough for the five of us to feel remarkably cramped. We were converting a hold into some more permanently pressurised living space but it was a slow job. In the meantime we got into the habit of splitting up. If we weren’t expecting trouble three of them would stay behind and I’d take the ship out with one of the others. Never Avon. If the matter was important enough to require his personal attention he would invariably insist that everyone go. Avon might not like people much but he did generally like having the maximum quantity of backup whenever he did anything potentially dangerous. It was one of the things that had made his behaviour on Terminal so unusual.

I enjoyed those two person missions. I got to know Soolin rather better and developed an appreciation for her cynical humour. Dayna was good company and even Vila wasn’t nearly as bad when away from the others and any perceptible danger. 

The pain of our losses had mostly faded. I think that I really was quite uncomplicatedly happy for the first time since the Academy. I had a really fast ship to fly and uncontested control of her much of the time. I had congenial company, plenty of interesting things to investigate and a sense of purpose. And I had a reason to look forward to going back home to Xenon Base, even if that reason was still playing out mostly in my head.

I had in fact become quite domesticated. Despite the asteroid incident I was still following Avon’s orders without a great deal of protest. After Terminal and half a dozen other missions that went wrong or were misguided from the start you’d think I’d have jumped at the chance to challenge Avon’s leadership. Instead I developed something that feels to me now, looking back on it, remarkably like blind faith. 

Avon seemed to take my newfound allegiance pretty much for granted. He was certainly annoyed enough on the rare occasions that I opposed him. There had been a headless android that had caused us a great deal of trouble and, according to Orac, was at risk of enslaving the entire human race. Avon wanted to cannibalise it for parts. Dayna blew it up. Avon called me all sorts of names about that one. Not her, I noted. He knew where the opposition had really come from. I didn’t back down on that one. We were better safe than sorry and Orac had been terrified of the thing. 

Generally speaking daily life with the Scorpio gang had settled down to the usual mix of stuff that went badly, stuff that went really badly and very rarely stuff that got us somewhere. I didn’t mind the risks; I’d been living dangerously all my adult life. As long as we got out, and somehow we always seemed to get out, it was all good enough for me. There was always the next plan to try and the plan after that. 

My lack of concern about how things were going was in sharp contrast to Avon’s mounting frustration. Servalan was out there and he really really wanted her dead. When we stumbled across a signal from her to ‘Cancer’, whom Avon assured us was a notoriously infallible assassin, it was I suppose inevitable that he should insist on going after Servalan himself and almost equally inevitable that we had to snatch him at the last second out of her grasp. 

We chased after Cancer and found ‘him’, along with a rather pathetic young lady who turned out to be the real assassin and who was working hand in glove with Servalan to trap us. Cancer died and we escaped, no harm done, but Avon wasn’t satisfied with that. Servalan had listened to us for hours as we ran unknowing round and round her trap and she had laughed at us, and I think that hurt him badly.

Avon sulked for a couple of days, stiffer and sharper even than usual. Then the others teleported down to one of our regular supply planets and I was left on the Scorpio’s flight deck with him. Avon stomped around for an hour or two while we waited, then finally let rip at me. I’d been waiting for it and I wasn’t going to suffer the sharp edge of his tongue without defending myself. 

“So you didn’t like her and I did. It made no difference,” I told him. “Neither of us, nor Soolin, saw through the disguise. That’s all that mattered.” 

“Except that I wouldn’t have let her cuddle up to me and steal the key that allowed her to go roaming round the ship killing people,” he snapped back. “I hope you realise that your behaviour was quite ridiculous.”

“Chivalrous,” I corrected. “Orac will no doubt give you the definition if you don’t recognise the word.” 

“Idiotic,” he retorted. “If all you’re good for is making eyes at women you can do it on some other ship.” He seemed genuinely angry. 

So was I. “I’m sure you’d rather I just stayed on this one and pined like a good little subordinate.”

“Your pining is not my problem,” he told me.

“No. You’ve made that abundantly clear,” I hissed at him.

He stopped then for a second. “And what did you expect me to do about that?” he asked.

Something in his tone jolted me back to reality. This was Kerr Avon and I was being childish. “Nothing,” I told him. “You’re not obliged to do anything, of course. Forget I mentioned it.” And, because my temper was still high and I rather resented being embarrassed into apologising, “It’s not as if I don’t have plenty of other options. There are all those attractive women out there to make eyes at, after all.”

Avon looked at me for a second more, then walked up to me. His hands clamped around my face as he tugged it close. The kiss was hard and deep and stunned me for a second into motionlessness. By the time I was reaching out for him he’d disengaged and stepped away. From the expression on his face it was clear that this hadn’t been intended as the start of something. 

“What the hell was that about?” I demanded. I could still feel the impression of his tongue at the back of my mouth, the taste of him. 

“You’re more use to me mooning lovesick around here than running after every pretty woman you meet,” he told me. “That’s all.”

“Bastard!” I snarled at him. “You can’t do that!”

“I just did.” He turned away to the communications console. “Time to raise the others. Soolin, this is Scorpio. Respond.”

I was most angry, I decided as I paced around the base that night, at the way he’d done it. It would have been so easy for him to subtly play on the feelings he knew damn well I had. He could have achieved exactly the same result and I would probably never have guessed that I’d been manipulated. But Avon couldn’t even be bothered to hide his intended purpose; he was that confident of my helpless reaction and that unconcerned about what I thought of him. 

Lovesick, he said. Well, I wasn’t lovesick. I’d never been lovesick in my life and I certainly wasn’t going to start over bloody Kerr Avon. He’d overplayed his hand and I was determined to make him pay for it.

I’d misread the situation, of course. In my defence I’m pretty sure Avon had intended me to misread it and he was smarter than I was. He’d misread it a little too despite his smartness. I might have been firmly on the hook but now I was going to be fighting the line all the way in. I was damn well going to show him that he was wrong about me even if I knew deep down that he was right.


	10. Chapter 10

I had been a pirate, a mercenary and a rebel, and before that a Federation military officer. I couldn't honestly say that I'd never killed an unarmed man or woman at close range in cold blood. That didn't mean it was an easy thing to do, particularly not when the woman in question was smiling rather sadly at me and murmuring my name. 

I couldn't kill Servalan when I found her alone on Virn. That meant that I couldn't tie her up and wait for Avon to get here either; I was pretty sure that would have had the same result as my gun only taking a little longer. 

So I let her live, I let her come with me and I let her seduce me. 

That last takes a little explaining, I'm aware of that. Everyone knows of Servalan's brutal reputation. Yet she was, in her way, quite beautiful. She had huge dark eyes and a soft voice and that sad smile. She was the most powerful woman in the galaxy and she spoke my name as if it was somehow always near her thoughts, as if I mattered to her. We were alone in a scarily atmospheric, deadly planet and I didn't know if either of us would survive. She told me she was grieving and It felt like she needed my protection, my comfort. It had been a long time since I'd taken anyone to bed, we had no choice but to spend the night in each other's company and I wanted her. 

That would have been enough on its own, to be honest. If that had been all then I'd probably have slept with her and never told the others what I'd done. But burning red hot, somewhere between my heart and my stomach, was the knowledge that this was the most perfect revenge imaginable. Avon would be absolutely furious, and I would have shown him that I was my own man. So much for being lovesick about him. 

My reasons were fairly clear to me even then, but Servalan's weren't quite so obvious. I chose at the time to accept her grief, her vulnerability, her need for comfort and her attraction to me as sufficient. It never really surprised me that people desired me. I tended to be more surprised when they didn't, Scorpio's crew for some reason excepted. 

Servalan liked attractive young men but she didn't lose her head over them. There were always more where they came from. I doubt that she chose me over a night alone just for my pretty face. As for grieving and vulnerable, she had clawed her way up to be President of the Federation over the bodies of pretty much everyone she met. She might not have been totally immune to grief and guilt but she wouldn't have let it break her even for a single night. I think now that she slept with me for exactly the same reason as I slept with her; to spite Avon. 

It wasn't all spite though, I think. I'm hardly one to breach a lady's confidences but Servalan has been dead a long time now and she was never what I'd call a lady to begin with. So I can tell you now what I wouldn't tell the others then. She liked touch and kisses and looking up at me with those huge eyes. She liked me to be on top, definitely. She didn't scratch or bite or threaten to have me executed; none of the things I'd half expected. She was rather sweet and rather gentle and quite eager to do anything I might want. And yes, she did that, and yes she was very good at it, and yes, I had to bite my lip next day because it was so tempting to rub Avon's nose in that particular salacious bit of information. But I was discreet, mostly, apart from letting him know that I'd slept with her. I had just about enough of a code of honour left from the young man I’d once been to not let me brag about details. 

I let her go in the end. I could hardly take her up to Scorpio after that and watch Avon execute her, could I? And she could have shot me but she didn't. Not all spite, you see. I don't know how good she might have been at faking tenderness but I wasn't really faking anything at all. I wasn't in love with Servalan in the slightest but I'd made love to her and that meant something to me other than just a way to get back at Avon. 

Avon was thoroughly unimpressed with what I’d done, but then so were the others. That much was obvious. Rather to my disappointment he didn’t lose his temper this time. I thought his calm was probably more rather studied than natural but it was calm. After a couple of sarcastic remarks he apparently let the whole thing go. I wasn’t entirely convinced that he didn’t care but he certainly didn’t start a fight over it. It was a pity. I could have done with a fight around then. 

Sex with Servalan had not released me from my fascination with Avon. Rather the opposite, in fact. I’d become resensitised to the idea of physical contact and how good it was. I wasn’t hankering after Servalan but I did want Avon to kiss me again and I couldn’t work out how I was going to make that happen now he had gone back to treating me as a bit of the furniture again. As I said, I’d have welcomed a fight, an argument, anything to break the status quo. 

What I got instead was a gold heist. Avon’s idea, he and a man who called him old friend and quite clearly wasn’t anything of the sort. We were crossed and double crossed and quite possibly triple crossed. There were a few fairly horrible moments when I thought he and Soolin were dead and then too much to do to have time to be relieved that they weren’t. It was another of Servalan’s traps but this time Avon knew than and took us in anyway. He deliberately let us- let me- remain ignorant of what we were getting into. 

I suppose that he might have genuinely thought that I was unreliable now as far as Servalan was concerned. I suspect though that keeping me in the dark was more his idea of punishment than of caution. There’s an argument that I deserved it but Avon’s secrecy didn’t do any of us any good on that occasion. The only small consolation as far as I was concerned was that it gave me a good reason to have a go at Avon for a change the next time I caught him alone.

“That was stupid,” I told him. “If you’d consulted me then things would have gone a great deal smoother.”

“Really?” He was fiddling with a console and didn’t look up but his voice was expressive enough.

“Yes, really. I’d have told you for a start that you never do black market deals in the local currency. Even the most neophyte smuggler knows that. What the hell were you thinking?”

He didn’t answer that so I answered it for him. “You were thinking about Servalan, weren’t you? Not the money at all. You just wanted an excuse to wave a gun in her face again.”

“I wanted,” Avon said darkly, “to kill her. Something that shouldn’t have still needed doing, should it, Tarrant?”

“She was unarmed,” I said. “I couldn’t just shoot her down.”

“Servalan is never unarmed,” he hissed at me. “Half the Federation military is poised to kill whole planets at a word from her, and you think the fact that she wasn’t holding a gun renders her meek and harmless?”

“She was unarmed on Virn,” I insisted. “She had no back up that time.”

“Of course,” His voice had turned smooth as he stood up to face me. “It was just you and her, wasn’t it? How convenient.”

“I’m not going to apologise for what I did.”

“I imagine not to me, anyway. That would rather take away the point of doing it at all.”

“Not everything,” I told him, with a certain lack of honesty, “is about you, Avon.”

“I hope for your sake you’re lying,” he said.

“And why is that?” 

“Because all of the other possible reasons that you might have had to cosy up with Servalan would make me despise you a great deal more than I already do. Do you want to tell me which of foolish, treacherous or debauched you’re going for or shall we stick with the explanation that makes sense to both of us?”

“Nothing wrong with being a bit debauched occasionally,” I said, going for a bit of lightness. “You should try it some time.”

“Not,” Avon said coldly, “with you.” He swept up his tools and walked as far away as Scorpio would allow, leaving me standing rather stupidly staring at his retreating back.


	11. Chapter 11

I took Avon at his word.

That probably wasn’t entirely sensible. Avon had been in the time I’d known him invariably prepared to lie to anyone under any circumstances for the slightest of perceived advantages. But my pride had been stung badly and I took Avon’s rejection as both heartfelt and final.

So that was that. I won’t say that I didn’t feel it badly at first. I’d had a lot more invested in my little nighttime fantasy than I’d ever let myself admit. For a while it felt like nothing would really be OK again. But I was resilient still and there was plenty on Scorpio to occupy my thoughts that wasn’t Avon/sex related so after a few weeks I could tell myself that I’d I got over it. Avon had gone back to treating me as much like a human being as he ever managed albeit an inferior and annoying one which was still better than being furniture.

There were ructions on board that were nothing to do with me. Vila and Avon had been trapped on board a sabotaged shuttle. They got out, but Vila told us when they returned that Avon had tried to kill him to lighten the mass. Avon noticeably failed to contradict him. Murdering his allies to stay alive wasn’t exactly new behaviour for Avon; it was what he’d done to poor Dr Paxton with the stardrive, but Vila was one of us.Vila seemed totally convinced that Avon would have done it if he’d had the chance. I wasn’t sure. I’d have liked to disbelieve Vila completely but unfortunately “wasn’t sure” was the best I could manage. Vila seemed so certain and Avon so bleak. 

The Federation were still using the pacification drug and were taking over planets at an accelerating rate. Avon had been working with Orac on the sample of the antidote that we’d taken and had finally figured out a theoretical way to get it produced. It would need the co-operation of a group of systems that were in the line of the Federation’s advance and one would have thought had every incentive to co-operate with us and each other. Unfortunately there was history between them that made that co-operation extremely hard to obtain.

We spent a couple of weeks going back and forth between the various leaders, trying to get some sort of conference set up. It was on one of those visits that I met a rather nice young lady called Zeeona who spent more of her time than strictly necessary showing me around. It was the sort of thing that happened every so often and I didn’t pay the incident a great deal of heed, apart from a vague hope that I might run into her again at some point. It was a bit of an ego boost anyway, after Avon. 

When she turned up on Xenon for the conference I was very pleased to see her, and rather flattered that she seemed so glad to see me. Her father had brought all the equipment we needed and it seemed that everything was going perfectly. 

Then, when we were briefly alone together, Zeeona told me that she’d come to see me. Her expression didn’t leave her meaning in any doubt. I don’t think I was even slightly hesitant about my response. If this adorable thing was in love with me, how could I do anything but love her back? 

I threw myself into romance with the passion of someone who quite desperately wanted to be in love with someone who wasn’t Avon. And Zeeona really wasn’t difficult to try to be in love with. She was sweet and pretty and intelligent and very innocent. We held hands and kissed and on our brief moments in private lay side by side with out arms around each other. I was rather proud of my self restraint, but actually I think I was never more than superficially aroused. Sex was Servalan and the hot private dreams of Avon I wasn’t allowed any more. What I felt for Zeeona was sweeter and more romantic, if considerably less exciting.

What the others thought of my whirlwind romance wasn’t entirely clear. Rather to my surprise the usually cynical Soolin offered to help us (and to face down Avon once it was done). Avon himself seemed determined to completely ignore the whole thing until he thought it was getting in the way of his deal, at which point he did his best to intimidate me into dropping it. In the circumstances that was hardly likely to work.

We were of course double crossed. I was finding it hard to remember an occasion on which we hadn’t been double crossed. Zeeona’s father mined the base with explosives and set a radioactive virus to work inside. We were trapped and quite desperate. My poor Zeeona was going to die with me before we’d ever had a chance to express our love fully. When Vila yelled at her I was quite ready to kill him. Even in that time of despair, however, I remember a moment of relief that at least Avon was on Scorpio and safe.

Avon came up with a way for us to get clean air and after a long wait we were able to teleport back to Scorpio. The base was completely unusable, however. Zeeona, the only one who understood the equipment, went down to decontaminate it. After a long silence we went after her. She had done the task perfectly, but she was dead.

“You knew.” When I cornered him alone in a far corridor of the base my accusation was harsh. I was badly shocked by the suddenness of tragedy. 

Avon shook his head. “Of course I didn’t.”

“Then you guessed.” I’d seen his face when we couldn’t reach her. I’d heard his voice when he insisted she had to go alone. 

He looked at me for a minute, clearly trying to decide whether he needed to have this conversation at all. I think he must have seen potential murder in my eyes because he nodded concession. “I thought it was possible.”

“Why?” I’d been through all this before, when my parents had died. An accident that couldn’t have been accidental. A choice made without reason. “Why was it possible?” 

He frowned a little then. “Think, Tarrant. She clearly felt responsible for her father’s actions. He’s dead. A lot of people died, doubtless many of them her close colleagues. The hope of an alliance against the Federation must have seemed lost. Despair is a potent force for the weak.”

“She wasn’t weak. Don’t you ever call her that!” I took a step towards him. “If you thought there was any chance at all you should never have let her go!”

“I’m not her keeper, “ he told me. “Without the equipment down there there is no hope at all for a dozen star systems. I wasn’t going to sacrifice them because one girl might do something stupid.”

I did hit him then, I think the first and only time I ever did so. He turned his face a little away from the blow so it glanced off his cheek but that was all. 

“Have you done?” he asked.

I so much wanted to hit him again. “I blame you,” I told him. 

“Obviously.” He sounded tired. “Yet for once I’m not significantly culpable. Zeeona made all her own choices from the start.” 

I knew that. I just couldn’t believe that they could have led her there. I turned away, a hand against the wall to steady myself. “I loved her,” I told him.

“Ah. So that’s what all the kissing was about. I did wonder.” His voice was perfectly neutral and I knew that he thought I was a fool.

“All right. I maybe didn’t love her. But I liked her a great deal.”

Avon nodded. “In which case, my commiserations.” I thought he probably meant it. I was already feeling embarrassed about hitting him.

“It wasn’t your fault.” I said, because I needed to say it. I knew he didn’t need me to tell him that.

To my surprise he shook his head slightly. “Not her death, no. But your sudden wild attachment- I wonder about that.” He smiled at me, one of his smiles without warmth. “Are you going to tell me that not everything is about me again?”

I was very tired and still in shock. I didn’t have the presence of mind left to lie convincingly so I said nothing. After a couple of seconds he nodded as if I’d replied. “I don’t think Scorpio can survive much more of your romantic diversions,” he said. “Apparently I need to do a little more to keep your focus here.” When he moved forward this time I was ready for him. 

It may seem a little callous of me to have ended up in bed with Avon a mere few hours after Zeeona’s death. But I’d been in love with him for far far longer and with a far greater strength of feeling than my rather juvenile and unconsummated affair with her had generated. Callous or not, I didn’t hesitate at all. 

Avon was a surprisingly good lover, though utterly inflexible about always taking the lead, and I was stupidly crazy about his slightest touch so from my point of view it was the best sex I’d ever had. I was never sure quite what he got from it. Distraction, I suppose. He was under more pressure than he’d probably ever been before, we’d had a long succession of Servalan-mediated failures and with Pylene 50 the Federation were sweeping up independent worlds at a rate that could barely begin to be believed. Talking half an hour off every so often to screw me senseless was probably the only non-drug way he had to blank his mind for a bit. 

It was very much in the moment. We didn’t mention the future. I suspect neither of us were sure that there was going to be one. I thought we might have a few months or weeks, at least. In the end we had six days. 

On the third day we blew up Xenon Base and left the planet for good. Tactically it was necessary; Zeeona’s father had known the location and we didn’t know how far his betrayal had reached. Personally it was a tragedy as far as I was concerned. The base had individual quarters, but Scorpio had no private spaces. 

I was even less happy when Avon announced that we were going to find Blake. Not just because of Terminal but because I couldn’t see how Blake was going to fit in with us at all. Still, none of us could say no to Avon any more and have him listen.

Avon was more enterprising that I was. One of Scorpio’s holds developed an electrical fault and had to be pressurised and heated so that he could work there. I was told off sharply to come and help.

When I walked into the hold it was still at near freezing. “Is there a fault?” I asked.

“Now what do you think?” Avon said, closing the hatch behind us and pulling me into a long kiss. It was too cold to undress more than absolutely necessary. My abiding memory of that hold is the chill of the racking behind me and the studs on Avon’s jacket scraping across my face as he wrapped his hands around me, the heat at mouth and groin the only warmth in the room. 

It turned out to be an intermittent fault, one of those tricky ones that go wrong again with some regularity. We thought we were getting away with it until we returned from our fourth attempt to repair the damn thing in three days to find the others watching us with some amusement. 

“Did you fix it this time?” Dayna asked.

“Yes.” Avon sounded as annoyed as someone who had spent three quarters of an hour struggling with recalcitrant wiring might sound. 

“That was clever,” Soolin said. “Very clever. Even for you, Avon.”

I was beginning to suspect we had been rumbled. “Why?”

“Because you left all your tools on your console, “ Vila said triumphantly. He stepped forward and presented them to Avon with a flourish. 

“Thank you,” Avon said gravely. “That should make it rather easier next time.”

There wasn’t a next time. Three hours later we reached Gauda Prime and all hell broke loose.

We were attacked by a number of ships, too many for us to handle. By the time I dived into the atmosphere to shake them off we’d been hit multiple times and I had barely any control left. Scorpio was going to hit the planet and hit it hard.

The others teleported down. Avon was the last to go. I suspect that it would have been one of the rare occasions when he did something stupidly and uncharacteristically heroic but he didn’t have the skills. He wouldn’t have been able to keep the ship together for long enough for me to get to the teleport. I could do that for him. The look in his eyes when he left me was almost enough to make me wonder if I’d misjudged his ability to care. 

I almost landed the ship, somehow. Not in a way that meant it would ever fly again, unfortunately, but I survived. I woke in a great deal of pain and with someone shooting at me, and Roj Blake standing in the wreckage of my ship and shooting back.

I knew it was Blake as soon as I could focus well enough to see his face. We’d come looking for him, after all; who else would I be expecting? I didn’t much like the look of him though. Avon had said bounty hunter and nothing contradicted that impression. Gauda Prime was meant to be crawling with criminals and people hunting them on behalf of the Feds. Blake looked more like hunter than prey to me, but I didn’t like either of the options much. When he dropped a (doubtless unloaded) gun within my reach and tossed me a pouch full of precious stones I was even less impressed. If he wanted an excuse to kill me he was going to have to do better than that.

Blake escorted me back to his base. I don’t think he gave me any options but it didn’t matter. Avon was looking for Blake. I was looking for Avon. My best bet was to stick with Blake for as long as he didn’t actively tried to kill me. 

That wasn’t very long. He turned the gun on me pretty much as soon as he got me inside his bounty hunting headquarters. He knew who I was but he wanted Avon as well and Orac. When his people reported mine in the base I broke free and ran. I had to find Avon before Blake did. I had to let him know what Blake was. I had to keep him safe. 

I found them. I told Avon that Blake had betrayed him. Blake arrived. Avon challenged him. Blake denied nothing. He went towards Avon and Avon shot him. Not one shot but three, well spaced, lethal. He caught Blake as he fell and the man died in his arms. 

That’s what happened. That’s how Blake died. I saw it all. Believe me or not, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s finally said. 

What happened next was rather less clear. There were troopers, there was firing. Dayna fell against me, blood spreading fast. I saw Avon still staring down at Blake’s body as if he’d heard and seen nothing else. I screamed his name and the whole world went away.


	12. Chapter 12

I woke on Earth, injuries healed, even the scars gone.

There is something about the world you grow up with that never leaves you. The gravity is perfect, the filtered water tastes right, even the reconditioned air has the tang of home. I was in a cell. It had food dispensers, fresh water on tap and decent sanitation. Every few hours the lights dimmed to let me sleep as well as I could. There was a vid screen, showing pre Federation films and bland educational vids. An automatic hatch brought me clean clothes daily and books to read. I occasionally caught a glimpse of the little robots that scurried around the floor while I was asleep cleaning up, and sometimes I woke groggier than usual to find that something in the cell had been changed while I slept.

I hated it from the start. Everything was clearly designed to keep me moreorless sane during a long, lonely incarceration and I didn’t want to be alone. But alone I was, for a very long time. I had no idea how long. I could have counted the sleep periods but I didn’t.

Eventually she came.

“Tarrant,” Her voice was matter of fact, as if we were picking up a conversation dropped some time before. “How are you?”

“Is he alive?” I demanded. “And the others?”

She laughed. “Oh Tarrant. Direct as always. That wasn’t the first question he asked, I can assure you.”

“So he is?” 

“He was. He was executed yesterday morning.”

I didn’t believe her, of course. “Why wait so long?”

“He had a piece of information I needed. It took a long time and various types of persuasion to get him to tell me. I thought the discomfort- the terminal discomfort, I’m afraid- of your other companions might be enough but he really was very stubborn. But I have what I need now.”

That didn’t make sense. I refused to accept it. “Yet you haven’t threatened me. Why would you hurt them but leave me alone?”

“Because,” her tone was cheerful but calm, as if she was merely telling me something she thought I might be interested to know, “the best interrogators know that to finally break someone you have to show him that he still has something to lose. After poor Vila finally succumbed Avon told me that the worst was over and I’d lost. Everyone who meant anything was dead. There was nothing else I could do to him.” 

She smiled at me. “That’s when I left him alone with the surveillance feed from your cell for a couple of days. He’d been told you were long since dead, of course. That’s when he finally broke. I had all I needed from him then, so I had him executed by firing squad, on live television of course.” Her gaze focussed past me for a moment. “He died bravely, if somewhat annoyed.”

Those dark eyes fixed back on my face, my reactions. “He wanted to see you, by the way, before the execution. I couldn’t let him, of course, but I thought you might like to know that he asked.”

I was still trying to make sense of what she was saying. “They are all dead?”

“All of them. I wanted you all alive but things got rather confused down there and Blake and Dayna were somehow shot with live bolts. Vila and Soolin had to be sacrificed to Avon’s unnecessary awkwardness. Scorpio’s a wreck and Orac is mine.”

I shook my head, still sure she was lying. “What about everyone needing something to lose, Servalan?”

“It doesn’t apply to you. You’re not under interrogation,” she told me. “There’s nothing I want from you, Tarrant. You’re only alive because you were leverage against Avon. Now he’s dead you’re not worth much to me. I don’t care if you curl up in despair and die.”

I’d made love to this woman, not that long and an eternity ago. I knew how her skin tasted, what made her shiver in pleasure, I’d kissed her through a long night. She claimed to have killed everyone I cared about under torture and now she’d come for me. 

“Shoot me then,” I told her. “You might as well end it properly.”

“I think not.” She glanced around the cell. “I think we’ll keep your execution on ice for the moment. They are useful things for boosting civilian morale after difficult periods and I believe we may be entering one of those. I wouldn’t want to waste another death so soon after Avon. You seem to be getting on fine in here. I’ll see you in..oh, probably a few months time.”

The guards flanking her stunned me again before I could reach her, of course. I woke up alone again and stayed that way for a very long time indeed. 

 

I knew absolutely nothing about the collapse of the Federation until it was over. The cause had very little to do with anything Blake or we had done. The virus that boosted immunity to Pylene 50 was a natural mutation of the common cold and equally contagious. The Federation had stretched far too far to be able to manage its population without the drugs and when immunity reached roughly ten percent of the treated population rebellions broke out everywhere, eventually even on Earth. The Federation fell and the rebels came into the military bases looking for weapons to loot and prisoners to free. They found me.

The hope I’d held onto for that long long time alone was in vain. For once Servalan hadn’t lied. Avon had been publicly executed two months before exactly as she had described. It was years before I finally managed to find enough courage to watch the recording. He did, as she had said, look remarkably annoyed but what she hadn’t told me was when he heard the order to fire he started to smile. There was no record of the others’ deaths but they never turned up alive and I have little doubt that they had indeed died under torture at Servalan’s command. I was consequently very distressed to find that she too was dead, killed by one of her own aides shortly before I was released. There was nothing left for me to do for any of them now. 

Despite the little that I felt we had achieved and my lingering doubts about Blake’s real loyalties he and Avon had become the names for the revolution to conjure with and as Scorpio’s pilot and sole survivor I had my own share of reflected glory. I was offered a senior command position in the new republic armed forces and very sensibly declined. I have never really been cut out for military command and I’m delighted to say that in all the years since I’ve never had to so much as pick up a loaded weapon. I went back to the revamped and renamed Academy instead as senior flight instructor and I’ve been flying the spots off my would-be hotshot students ever since. 

Four years after the Revolution someone rather wonderful joined the staff to teach flight programming and I married him. Our oldest child is called Deeta. He nearly wasn’t, but revolutionary names were back in that year and I didn’t want my son to be the fourth Avon in his class. I’ve never liked Kerr as a name. He’s six years old and I watched him playing ‘Liberator and the Federation’ in the playground last week. At the moment it no doubt seems quite natural to him that Daddy’s workplace should be called the same as Daddy, but at some point he’s going to have questions about who Blake and Avon really were and what I’m doing there slipping into the edge of some of the stories too. 

This isn’t a story for six year olds. It wasn’t a story for the young Republic, either. At the start it needed all its heroes intact. But the Republic has reached eighteen years and its majority now, old enough for adult themes, old enough for the truth. After all this time I don’t think anyone’s going to try and lynch me for my part in all this, though I do expect a few journalists on the doorstep for a while. If they want to rename the Del Tarrant Flight Academy to something else I’ve got no problem with that apart from the paperwork involved. Since they put me in charge of the place I’ve grown rather unenthusiastic about things that create unnecessary extra administration. 

It’s Heroes Day tomorrow. Not a coincidence. My publisher thought that it would be appropriate for this to come out tomorrow, but then even she doesn’t yet know everything that’s in it. Instead it’s coming out the day after. Let the heroes have one more day to themselves without headlines screaming “Tarrant Confesses All; Did Avon Really Murder Blake!”

I never really knew Blake properly. All the time that I spent with him he was pretending (supposedly pretending- did anyone alive at the end really know for sure?) to be a brutal bounty hunter. I found him entirely convincing in the role. Blake’s not one of my heroes. I think I’ll leave it at that.

Avon would have found the idea of being one of the founding heroes of the republic amusing. I can picture his slow smile as I write. He was never a hero, at least not by choice. He did some terrible things to stay alive because living was worth that much to him. I don’t believe Avon would have watched Vila and Soolin die in agony just to protect Orac’s whereabouts. He must have known that it was only the secret he held that was staying all their executions and carrying on breathing for a while longer was always the thing that was most precious to him. 

They say everyone has their breaking point, though, and maybe the idea of witnessing yet another of us die slowly and screaming was too much. I don’t attribute anything more personal to his final capitulation than that. I don’t claim he loved me, nothing like. I think he loved Anna who betrayed him. Maybe he loved Blake, despite his protestations otherwise. He certainly gunned him down like a man who couldn’t face being betrayed again. But I hope in the end I was that rare thing for him, a kind of friend.

Kerr Avon didn’t in the end contribute that much tangible to the overthrow of the Federation. The rebellion’s potentially greatest asset, the Liberator, was destroyed. The group he’d put together before we went to Gauda Prime managed to stay together and stave off bits of the Federation advance but they wouldn’t have lasted much longer without the virus. The Pylene 50 antidote was never manufactured on a significant scale. He never even managed to kill Servalan; she watched his execution and outlived him by nearly two months. 

Despite that, he, and we, and Scorpio somehow became a rallying cry for freedom. Avon’s televised execution (coinciding as it did with the spread of the virus) was the trigger for the first major uprising of the Revolution, across thirty nine worlds, or so the story goes. That’s why Heroes Day is commemorated on the anniversary of his death, not Blakes’ three months before. That small piece of one-upmanship really would have amused him, I think.

Tomorrow, as every year, I’ll be lighting candles for Avon and for Soolin, Cally, Dayna and of course Vila, on Heroes Day. We were none of us heroes, or maybe all of us were. I’m still not quite sure which. The Galaxy is mostly a better place now than it was when I first set eyes on Kerr Avon on Liberator and if we had any small part to play in that maybe that will be enough to make a story- the real story, this time- that’s good enough for Deeta when he’s old enough to ask.


End file.
